


Seeing

by wowbright



Series: Glee Season 6 Episode Reactions [16]
Category: Glee
Genre: Art, Episode: s06e08 A Wedding, Episode: s06e09 Child Star, Honeymoon, Intergenerational friendship, Love, M/M, Marriage, Painting, Provincetown, Same-Sex Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 04:25:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3515324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wowbright/pseuds/wowbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt and Blaine take an art class with a bunch of old folks while in Provincetown. Fluffy fluff (with brief allusion to the early AIDS epidemic) for lishashisha. Also on <a href="http://wowbright.tumblr.com/post/113206606410/fic-seeing-kurt-blaine-honeymoon">Tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing

Sue was lying. Kurt and Blaine get Andrew Sullivan’s summerhouse in Provincetown for a full two weeks, not just a weekend.

Which is good, because it takes at least two full days to get into the routine of not doing or worrying about anything, especially with Rachel texting every half hour with panicked messages about bar mitzvahs and New Directions personality conflicts.

They jokingly talk about throwing their phones into the Atlantic Ocean, and more seriously experiment with shutting them off and leaving them in the kitchen silverware drawer. But they’ve already become quite attached to the local tidal schedule app, so that only works for a day before they take their phones out again.

Between them, they have 13 messages from Rachel when they turn their phones back on.

Kurt sends a threatening text to Rachel.

_We are ON OUR HONEYMOON. If you text us one more time about something that is not life or death, we will block you and never come back to Lima._

That keeps her mostly silent, though they do get a couple weird messages a few days later about the bar mitzvah being trapped in a box hanging perilously from the ceiling.

Those are quickly followed by a _Never mind. Roderick saved him_ , so they don’t worry about it. They weren’t really worried about it in the first place. The New Directions have always been good at saving themselves.

*

Provincetown is beautiful this time of year. Not that Kurt and Blaine know what it looks like at any other time of year, but still. The famous New England fall colors are in full effect, more brilliant than the rainbow flags that dot the downtown streets. A lot of the shops are already closed for the season, but there are still a decent number of people about – mostly old retirees who aren’t confined by work schedules from spending all their time on the shore.

“Do you think Sue sent us here because she knew how much we both like old people?” Blaine says as they’re strolling down Commercial Street, holding hands.

Kurt nudges their shoulders together. “What? Are you suggesting a threesome?” He feels safe saying it. Once they got back together, Blaine was surprisingly laid back about the whole Walter thing. He’d had a much more controversial boyfriend of his own in the interlude, after all. _Walter’s a good-looking man,_ Blaine said the first time they talked about it. _Who knows? If I’d met him before I ran into Dave…_ Kurt reacted to that with a giggle and long, uncensored kiss.

Blaine gives Kurt a knowing wink. “No threesomes just yet. We can wait until we need to re-energize our sex lives for that.”

“That will probably be a while,” Kurt says. They go into a few shops, but neither of them can stop thinking about sex now. So they return to Andrew Sullivan’s house and spend most of the afternoon with Blaine tied to the headboard.

Kurt loves the contrast of black fabric against the pale insides of Blaine's wrists. He loves the way Blaine's wedding band catches the sun when he curls his fingers in pleasure.

*

They drop in at the community center. Or maybe it’s the senior center. They’re not exactly sure. They’re the only two people in the whole place below the age of 50, unless you count the tai chi instructor leading a class in the main atrium.

There’s a calendar of events by the front door. “Drop-in watercolor classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” Blaine reads from the middle. He turns to Kurt. “We should go to one. I’ve always wanted to paint you.”

Their hands are joined like they almost always are these days. Kurt rubs his thumb over Blaine’s wedding band. “Inspiring, am I?”

Blaine looks up at Kurt with an unabashed, adoring smile that makes Kurt’s heart flutter for the eightieth time today. “Of course.”

“Well then,” Kurt says. “We’ll go tomorrow – unless we’re, you know, tied up.”

Blaine leans up to kiss Kurt’s cheek. “Thank you.”

“It’s nothing to thank me for. Maybe I want to learn to paint _you_.” Kurt is picturing a moment when he woke up last night. Blaine had thrown the covers down over his waist. His skin seemed translucent and ethereal in the moon’s blue light. But when Kurt touched it, it was a solid and real as his own body. Blaine stirred then without quite waking. He turned and curled into Kurt's body, nuzzling his head against Kurt’s chest. Kurt kept watching him: the soft way their combined breaths made Blaine's body rise and fall; Blaine's arm curved against Kurt's skin; his hair so black Kurt could disappear into it.

_I get to hold you every night for the rest of my life,_ Kurt thought, and felt as happy as when he’d said _I do_.

*

The subject of their first lesson in landscapes, not portraits. It’s a brilliant day outside, billowing white clouds sweeping across the sky, their edges bright with sun. It’s unusually warm, but Kurt and Blaine are both wearing scarves because they want to. Most of the students have brought to their own palettes and easels, but there are spares for Kurt and Blaine. They carry their equipment out to the boardwalk, talking animatedly as they go.

All the other students must be over 60. There’s not a single one of them without at least a streak of white or grey at the temples. They all want to know about the two young men in the matching wedding rings. “Are you on your honeymoon?” asks a gray-haired lady in a flowing hippie skirt and leather biker jacket.

Kurt nods bashfully. Blaine puffs his chest out and says, “Yes.”

“But you can’t be older than…”

“Twenty-one,” Kurt says. “Blaine is twenty.”

“Delightful!” says a gentleman in chinos and a thick cable knit sweater. “I was married at your age. If only it had been to a man.”

A thickset man in jeans and a windbreaker nudges chinos guy with his elbow.

Chinos guy smiles. ”But then maybe I never would have met Charlie here,” he says, curling his hand around windbreaker man’s shoulder. “And that would have been a shame.”

When they get to the boardwalk, Blaine takes the lesson as seriously as he does any new endeavor. His face is concentrated, his brow furrowed. Kurt pays no attention to the landscape and turns his easel so he can paint Blaine instead.

Blaine looks up. “Hey, that’s not the lesson!”

“I’m on my honeymoon,” Kurt says. “I can do whatever I want.”

Kurt paints Blaine’s eyebrows lovingly, but he gets stuck on the eyes.

Hippie skirt leans in. “Faces are the hardest,” she says. "You have to learn to see them in a completely new way.”

Kurt strikes up a conversation with her. She loves musicals of the 1940s and ‘50s, but at some point it becomes clear that the spouse she keeps mentioning is a man, not a woman. Kurt is slightly shocked, but tries not to show it.

She catches on. “Scandalous, isn’t it?” she says with a laugh. “I moved here to take care of my brother and immediately fell in love. This place is like a slice of heaven.”

“Oh,” Kurt says. “Is he sick?”

She shakes her head. “Not anymore. This was back in the early 90s. You know how it was – or I guess maybe you don’t. There weren’t any of the good antiretrovirals like we have now. So when his immune system failed – well, that was it. He left me his summer house when he died and ... here we are.”

The light breeze around them suddenly feels cold. Kurt glances over at Blaine to be sure he hasn’t strayed from view. Blaine likes to talk about them finding each other in every lifetime, but Kurt's never been completely convinced it’s possible, even if reincarnation is a real thing. There would be so many obstacles to overcome. Kurt wonders about their most recent hypothetical lives before this one. What if those lives ended just before this one began? What if they were both like this woman’s brother, dying before their time? Had they lived long enough to find each other?

“Janet!” bellows a voice from behind them. It’s Charlie, the windbreaker man. “They’re on their honeymoon, for crying out loud.”

“No, it’s okay,” Kurt says. And really it is. Kurt's known that death is a part of life as long as he can remember. He never completely forgets it. He turns back to Janet. “Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend how lucky we have it now.”

After the class, the regulars invite Kurt and Blaine along to lunch with them at a local lobster shack. Blaine is more talkative now that the lesson is over, and he and Kurt both ask a million questions about Provincetown and the past. They listen raptly as they eat their crab cakes and lobster bisque.

A guy named Jack is in the middle of a fascinating story about the old Stonewall when the cuckoo clock in the corner strikes three. “Look at the time!” he says. “Surely you to have something better to do _on your honeymoon_ than listen to old farts talk about history.”

“Yes,” says Tammy, a soft butch former librarian in a plaid fisherman’s jacket. “But no one can do _that_ all day, not even at _their_ age.”

“Ah,” pipes in Steve, the one in the cable knit sweater. “But they’ve been with us for the past five hours. Surely that’s as long a break as they can stand?”

Kurt and Blaine both burn bright red, but they don’t really mind. It’s refreshing, actually, to be at the center of that kind of teasing. People in Lima don’t speak about their sexuality with nearly so much ease.

“I’m so glad to have this lifetime with you,” Kurt says as they walk back to the summerhouse. “I can’t believe I almost let this chance go.”

“We would have found each other again,” Blaine says. “In four years or forty. My heart is like a compass when it comes to you.”

“And I’m the North _Pole_?” Kurt waggles his eyebrows fiendishly on the word “pole.”

“In more ways than one.” Blaine laughs and presses a kiss to Kurt’s cheek.

*

Kurt and Blaine go whale watching the next day, but they’re back at the watercolor class the day after that and for the next class, too. Blaine borrows a pallet and easel from the community center and sets it up in the bedroom so he can practice in the early morning while Kurt's still asleep, one half draped in blankets, the other half draped in light. Blaine doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he tries anyway, and he’s not… well, he’s not terrible from a technical standpoint. And from an artistic standpoint, there’s something magnetic about the paintings – or at least Kurt thinks so.

“Those lines,” Kurt says later, leaning against Blaine’s shoulder. “I feel like I could wrap my hands around them. It all looks so… visceral. Alive. But not fleeting. There’s something permanent about it. Permanent, but shifting. Like sand.” Kurt sighs. “You have a beautiful way of seeing things, Blaine.”

“Well,” Blaine says. “That’s because it’s you I’m seeing.”

*

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum is open late on Fridays. Kurt and Blaine have spent all afternoon in bed, so it’s refreshing to get outside in the brisk evening air.

Blaine spends a lot of time looking at the nudes. There’s a particular one that he’s drawn to – a pair of lovers with bodies entwined. “I wish I could paint us like that,” Blaine says when Kurt comes to stand next to him. Blaine looks over his shoulder to see if anyone’s close, then leans up to whisper into Kurt’s ear, “I wish I could see us when we’re together. That I could paint you making love to me. You’re so… _exquisite_.”

Kurt feels suddenly hot, his clothes tight – not just his pants, but his shirt, too, like it can’t quite adjust to how much Kurt's heart has expanded these past few weeks. He rubs Blaine’s shoulder. “You are, too. More than you know.”

*

Kurt makes a joke before their last class that Blaine should ask for tips on nude portraits, and what’s the best light for capturing a cock. Blaine blushes violently and asks no such thing. Instead, he looks up from his work every few minutes to make eye contact with Kurt and breaks into giggles.

They go out for lunch with the rest of the students. They friend each of them on Facebook before they leave. It turns out that Jack spends half the year in New York, and they make plans to see him there in February.

*

They keep taking art classes when they get back to Lima and even when they return to New York, though not as often. Neither of them are brilliant, but it’s nice to have one creative area where you don’t need to shine.

Besides, it’s mostly about the process. On some Sunday afternoons while Blaine is reading the _Times_ , Kurt likes to set up the easel and work on capturing Blaine’s face. It’s incredibly difficult, but rewarding too – every time Kurt goes to do it, he notices something about Blaine that he’s never noticed before. His heart does a back flip, just like it did that day on the staircase. Just like it did on the day they wed.

It’s true, what Janet said, about painting requiring you to be able to look at faces in a different way. Marriage does that, too. Back when Kurt first fell in love with Blaine, he saw love as the end-all and be-all, the Shangri-La at the end of a long climb.

Kurt doesn’t believe that anymore. Love is the climb itself: the choice to tether yourself to another climber and put one foot in front of another, through bad weather and good.

Since they’ve reunited, the weather’s been mostly good. But even in bad weather, it’s still Blaine he wants at the other end of the rope. There is no one Kurt trusts so much with his well-being. He feels the privilege of moments like this, where even amid silence he can learn something new about Blaine.

Blaine’s eyes move toward Kurt, but the rest of him stays still. He knows not to move too much when Kurt is at work. “How’s your painting turning out?” His face is calm and open, waiting for an answer.

“It’s a work in progress,” Kurt says.

Blaine smiles. The afternoon light dances in his eyes. “Those,” he says, “are my favorite kind.”

 


End file.
